this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Eric Schmidt apparently bought Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago

Getting rid of waste heat is a huge problem in space. Vacuum is a great insulator because there's no material to conduct heat away from an object.

The idea of space being "cold" has more to with pressure (or lack thereof) rather than temperature, because ideal gas law:

If you suddenly expose a pressurized container full of heated atmosphere to vacuum, you get a massive pressure drop and therefore also a massive temperature drop.

You can't do this to cool a computer system in space - you would need a constant supply of some fluid or gas that you could just dump into space that would take the heat out with it.